In "Stanzas in Meditation" and
"Patriarchal Poetry," Stein attempts to bring this interplay directly
to the surface of language: "For before let it before to be before spell to
be before to be before to have to be to be for before to be tell to be . .
." (Yale 106). After the first paragraph of "Patriarchal
Poetry" announces Stein's desire to unfasten and "carry away" the
structures of patriarchal language, poetry, and culture, the second paragraph,
quoted above, begins to mark a space "before" words, before language
has to spell and to be (as signification or representation), and thus to spell
"to be." Trying to retain the performative character of this
linguistic occurrence, Stein not only excludes nouns but also undoes grammatical
strictures to give her language more of a dynamic and a protean, ever-shifting,
quality. The tireless repetition and variation of the same phrases—for,
before, let it, to be—combined with the absence of punctuation marks, creates
the impression of language in a melted state, free to combine and coalesce in
ways unexpected, unacceptable, or even repressed by discursive practices. In
order to spell what transpires "before to be before to have to be"—before
language congeals into its historically and culturally authorized forms—Stein's
texts engage, as it were, in their own form of cryptography, in the continuous
process of transposing the space before words into the written text. As a form
of intralingual or intratextual transposition, such writing aims to bring to
words the erased, unknown, "language," often sought by feminist
critiques of aesthetics—what DuPlessis provocatively calls the "Etruscan
language."

"Patriarchal Poetry" makes clear that it is in this
"semiotic" state or space that language possesses its most disruptive
potential, one that Stein's texts induce in order to subvert, put into question,
and play with not only literary or textual practices but also the culture and
society that have instituted them. How to Write suggests that Stein's
reimagining of literary language has as its specific purpose developing a new
mode of thinking that would not only transform literary inscription but overhaul
traditional ways of conceiving the world in terms of representation and
signification. In "Poetry and Grammar," Stein proposes to subvert
literary practice, its predilection for nouns and their definitional function,
by means of writing as it were apart from substantives and thus gaining access
to what she terms the "intense existence" of things and the world:
"I had to feel anything and everything that for me was existing so
intensely that I could put it down in writing as a thing in itself without
necessarily using its name" (Lectures 242). For Stein, "intense
existence" refers to things regarded in terms of the event—as the
ever-shifting matrix of relations reconstituted into the singularity of its
occurrence—rather than as objects endowed with an essence and definable by
means of nouns or substantives. The intensity Stein has in mind describes the
idiomatic character of each happening, the particularity of its configuration
and circumstances, which are lost in the generality of linguistic naming.
Existing intensely—as always singular events—things evade grammatical and
semantic categories, and Stein's writing proposes to revise and adjust literary
language accordingly. "Poetry and Grammar" offers then another way of
formulating what in How to Write takes the shape of the poetics of event—focused
on the unfolding of the world into language rather than on description,
definition, and propositional statements—characteristic of the avant-garde's
challenge to aesthetics. For Stein this difficult and elusive poetics has the
task of finding what the last section of How to Write describes as
"a vocabulary for thinking." This vocabulary comprises much more than
just lexical items; it offers in fact a matrix for thinking the event that would
be different from thinking in substantive forms: concepts, ideas, propositions,
in short, "nouns."

Reimagining thinking away from concepts and definitions, away from its
practices of nominalization/objectification, and toward its poetic form, makes
Stein's work central not only to the avant-garde's revision of aesthetics but
also to the critique of modernity and its cultural manifestations. The relevance
of Stein's writing is less in terms of specific representations, images, or
cultural practices and more with respect to the very elements—linguistic,
conceptual, iconic—that make up the order of representation. Thus, in Tender
Buttons, Stein's implicit critique of the exclusion of domesticity and
ordinary language from high modernist art takes the form of undoing definitional
and descriptive patterns in reference to everyday objects, utensils, meals, and
living spaces. In "Patriarchal Poetry," it is not the images of
femininity (with the exception of the sonnet) that Stein takes apart but instead
the discourse of patriarchal culture: objectification, definition, possession
through cognition, erasure of difference, linear progression, propositional
forms of language. Stein often identifies these features with the "poetry
of nouns"—the objectifying discourse characteristic of modern rationality—which,
operating exclusively in terms of the name, the proper, property, identity, and
substance, obliterates the event-character of experience. Stein appears to
descend in her texts to this elemental level of engagement with language in
order to put her critique into play at the roots of language, as it were, where
it can most disconcert and put into question language practices that other
radical discourses still have to follow, even if their "content" may
explicitly disavow and criticize them. Beyond this, however, the elemental
linguistic energy that Stein's texts produce, her playfulness and irony, serve
purposes that reach across literary practice, into its cultural and social
significance and into the critical potential inherent in the social functions of
art.

In "Patriarchal Poetry," the declared literary, cultural, and, by
extension, philosophical aim is the resistance to patriarchal culture and its
dominant "poetry":

How do you do it.
Patriarchal Poetry might be withstood.
Patriarchal Poetry at peace.
Patriarchal Poetry a piece.
Patriarchal Poetry in peace.
Patriarchal Poetry in pieces.
Patriarchal Poetry as peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry
at peace.
Patriarchal Poetry or peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry
or pieces of Patriarchal Poetry.
Very pretty very prettily very prettily very pretty very
prettily. (Yale 133)

Ironically playing "piece(s)" against "peace," Stein
indicates the desire and the possibility of withstanding Patriarchal Poetry and
leaving it "in pieces" rather than "in peace." Although
Stein's poem makes clear that we have to "return" to Patriarchal
Poetry, since there is no easy exit from patriarchal forms of culture and
writing, the trajectory of this return and the shape in which Patriarchal Poetry
will find itself depends above all upon what kind of writing one performs and
upon the use to which one puts language.

Works like "Patriarchal Poetry" suggest that Stein's literary
practice moves toward uncovering the link between elemental linguistic
configurations and their potential to both identify and explode the
"patriarchal grammar" of the world—its matrix of the relations of
difference, dependence, and power. As Stein indicates in How to Write, grammar
holds the key to the order of discourse and representation that the tradition
seeks to repeat and perpetuate. The repetitiveness of grammar, its insistence on
following rules, reflects for Stein the cultural order that links stability with
the figure of the father and with patriarchal power—the order of sameness,
repetition, and predictability that erases difference. The last line of
"Patriarchal Poetry" is one of the most telling examples in this
context: "Patriarchal poetry and twice patriarchal poetry" (Yale 146).
Stein's linking of this repetitiveness and predictability of grammar with the
central role of nouns in language suggests that the everyday itself is
"patriarchal"—structured and regulated by the hierarchical rules of
representation that assure the dominance of the "more valuable"
substantive forms of objectified knowledge.

At the same time, though, "Grammar is in our power" (How to
Write 73)—it is open to revision, transformation, and rewriting, the
operations that Stein's texts continuously perform on their language and
inherited conventions. Identifying the phallocratic complicity of traditional
grammar with the grammar of culture—"Grammar is contained in father . .
." (How to Write 99)—Stein counters the hegemony of this
"patriarchal poetry" by bringing to our attention the disruptive and
transformative power of language, especially of its "poetic" space. In
this gesture, she points out the pertinence of the avant-garde revisions of
aesthetics, even in their extreme, exploratory articulations, to the critical
and transformative powers within culture; more, her writing allows us to
identify the intersections of the "elementary" work that avant-garde
artists undertake on the discourses of art (for example, Malevich in painting,
Khlebnikov, Beckett, or Bialoszewski in literature) with the issues of power,
domination, and cultural monopoly. One could argue that it is texts like
"Patriarchal Poetry" that show us not only that literature is never,
even at the apparent extreme of experimentation, purely formal or "for its
own sake," but also how such elemental and seemingly confined literature in
fact encodes subversive intent and practice into its very mode of writing.

. . .

One of the links between Stein's work and feminist critique is precisely this
claim that there is no common knowledge or knowledge of the commonplace that
would return us to some sense of a "substantive," even if only local,
community. Stein's articulation of the everyday explodes the notion of common
knowledge by turning her poetics of domesticity into the arena for the problems
of gender, femininity, and lesbianism. In her texts the ordinary is precisely
the locale where conflict, difference, otherness, and oppression mark
themselves. In other words, the local is the locus of difference: of sexual,
gender, and language difference. "Patriarchal Poetry" associates the
local with gender difference, with the feminine subverting the masculine
(patriarchal) hegemony of sameness through the parody of its "mean"
practices of erasing differences and imposing the unity of meaning:
"Patriarchal Poetry is the same. / . . . / Patriarchal Poetry connected
with mean" (Yale 139).

from "The Poetics of Event: Stein, the Avant-Garde, and the Aesthetic
Turn of Philosophy." SAGETRIEB 12.3

Meredith Yearsley

Much of Stein's writing, as DeKoven has pointed out, has been devoted to demolishing
and replacing the worn-out conventions and hierarchical orders of discourse invented by
patriarchal society. But the long poem "Patriarchal Poetry" is not
"about" this concern; rather it places the term "patriarchal poetry"
into the multiple suggestive incoherent mode of discourse it is opposed to, where it
stands out like a rock, meaning nothing and heard only as a drum beat. "'Patriarchal
Poetry is not cubistic at all," wrote Virgil Thomson, who knew Stein while she
was composing it, "not angular or explosive or in any way visual. It is rounded,
romantic, visceral, auditory, vastly structured, developed like a symphony."
Beautifully musical, the piece modulates through highly rhythmical interweavings of word
motifs often reminiscent of the repeated squeakings and jerkings of a piece of machinery:
"Is it best to support Allan Allan will Allan Allan is it best to support Allan Allan
will Allan best to support Allan will patriarchal poetry Allan will patriarchal poetry
Allan will patriarchal poetry is it best to support Allan . . . ." Its final lines
resound with the long drawn-out cadence of the symphonic finale:

Patriarchal poetry has to be which is best for them at three
which is best and will be be and why why patriarchal poetry is
not to try try twice.

In 1927 Gertrude Stein writes a long poem entitled "Patriarchal
Poetry" that exactly measures her distance from the canon. A busy subject,
patriarchal poetry is this, is that, is just about everything. It writes patriotic poetry:
marches left right, left right. It writes sonnets: "To the wife of my bosom." It
is the name and the character of the text, a comic mask. The poem ends with singsong, with
Mother Goose, with a "Dinky pinky dinky pinky dinky pinky lullaby." It is a
wicked thing to do to Patriarchal Poetry, to show its dinky pinky, not take it seriously.

Patriarchal Poetry not to try. Patriarchal Poetry and lullaby.
Patriarchal Poetry not to try Patriarchal poetry at once and why patriarchal poetry at
once and by by and by Patriarchal poetry has to be which is best for them at three which
is best and will be be and why why patriarchal poetry is not to try try twice.

In the world of Stein's writing the bonds that tie words to things are
loosened and names split off from objects. Stein attempts to perceive everything fresh, as
if she had never seen it before. She refuses to use words merely because they are
associated with events or because grammatical habit prescribes their use in the
construction of sentences. No class of words is more important than any other. Stein
constructs with prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions as much as with nouns and verbs.
There is no hierarchy of words or of usage. In 1927 she wrote a piece entitled
"Patriarchal Poetry," which implied that patriarchal poetry, along with other
hierarchical systems, was dead and needed to be laid to rest.

Patriarchal Poetry might be withstood.
Patriarchal Poetry at peace.
Patriarchal Poetry a piece.
Patriarchal Poetry in peace.
Patriarchal Poetry in pieces.
Patriarchal Poetry as peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry at peace.
Patriarchal Poetry or peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry or pieces of Patriarchal
Poetry.

She pays Patriarchal Poetry respect by capitalisation, but
capitalisation of something that is already in pieces becomes a backhanded compliment.

Patriarchal organisation is vertical, hierarchical and fixed. The
landscape of Stein's world is horizontal, democratic and fluid. In it, all things and all
words are of equal value; nothing is more important than anything else nor are words
permanently attached to things. To call hers a comic world means not that nothing is
sacred but that everything is sacred, from small to large, from near to far, from word to
word. Her meditations require slow reading, without syntactical assumptions. The pleasure
of reading Stein is the pleasure of spreading out the words in a plentitude that creates
not uniformity but fullness of possibility.

Let her be let her be let her
be let her be to be to be
let her be let her try.
To be shy.
("Patriarchal Poetry," YGS, 120)

In 1927 Stein returns to the question of creation from a new angle. In the earlier
"Mildred Aldrich Saturday" she challenges the concept of a storyteller, whether
female or male, a challenge heightened in A Birthday Book's eschewal of story or
teller in favor of a mythos of continual and unordered linguistic birth. Although her 1927
prose poem "Patriarchal Poetry" continues this mythos, a new element appears in
the annunciation of a writing primarilyalthough not exclusivelyattached to a
female presence and landscape. This writing will find its fullest expression in the 1927
novel Lucy Church Amiably.

"Patriarchal Poetry" grounds its consideration of literary origination and
ownership in manifold allusions to Genesis. In rewriting Genesis, Stein's meditation links
monotheistic creation with a monologic and authoritarian literary form allied to
historical and narrative linearity. We may enter into her meditation via a surprising
riddle occurring halfway through "Patriarchal Poetry":

What is the difference between a fig and an apple. One
comes before the other. What is the difference between a fig and an apple one comes before
the other what is the difference between a fig and an apple one comes before the other. (YGS,
128)

At first glance, the answer ("One comes before the other") appears
irrelevant. Although "fig" comes before "apple" in the sentence, this
priority evinces a humorous arbitrariness, and indeed under- goes a sudden reversal as a
second "fig" follows "apple," to be followed in turn by another
"apple." The claim to priority itselfto being
"before"becomes comically impossible to sustain.

Whereas the order of "figs" and "apples" in Genesis holds crucial
significance for the conceptual shape of Western Judeo-Christian history, Stein blithely
changes the original order in her first sentence. In the account of the Fall the apple
"comes before" the fig, in that Eve and then Adam, in eating the apple, cause
their own Fall, represented by their attempt to hide their nakedness in fig leaves. This
story represents and explains the woman's "difference" in a negative sense. The
price of Eve's transgression is the pain of childbirth and, as Stein may have interpreted
it, the secondary status of women within patriarchal culture: "In pain shall you bear
children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you."

The mention of "figs" and "apples" evokes a situation of Adamic
naming grounded in the similarity of Adam to the original Namer. John's interpretation of
Genesis in linguistic terms"ln the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God"marks the originary power of God as the Word
who, in naming, calls into existence and who continues to govern the world He has named.
The story's sequence, from God's Creation to the creation of Adam and then to the creation
and transgression of Eve, may be said to form an argument about the importance of priority
in the establishment, from the beginning, of hierarchical relationships. Stein reveals the
arbitrariness and changeability of such a sequence. Priority becomes a comic and even a
useless issue, as the Word metamorphoses into words, composed of letters on a page:
"f-I-f," "a-p-p-l -e." The order of letters in each word, although
agreed upon by all speakers of the English language, manifests itself within Stein's
writing as essentially arbitrary, just as the sequence of "apple" to
"fig" exists simply through consensus: and who, Stein might ask, gives a fig for
consensus? Eve's transgression against God's Word becomes in Stein's text a
"mistake""Patriarchal poetry makes no mistake" (YGS, 124)to
be reclaimed as Stein's project. By making mistakes"Patriarchal Poetry makes
mistakes" (YGS, 132)Stein turns Genesis on its head. She reenters the
"Garden," not of Eden (God's and Adam's garden), but of language itself, a field
within which words may be loosened from the old order, the old stories and meanings. Eve's
capacity to make "mistakes" (a significantly mild term) forms matter for
celebration, as in "Poetry and Grammar," where Stein observes:

[Verbs and adverbs] have one very nice quality and that is that they can
be so mistaken. It is wonderful the number of mistakes a verb can make and that is equally
true of its adverb. Nouns and adjectives never can make mistakes can never be mistaken but
verbs can be so endlessly, both as to what they do and how they agree or disagree with
whatever they do. (LIA, 211-12)

Once words make "mistakes," leaping away from their traditional significances
and contexts, "patriarchal poetry" may be "fastened back."
"Patriarchal Poetry" suggests this fastening in its beginning: "As long as
it took fasten it back to a place where after all he would be carried away" (YGS, 106).
If "it" signifies "patriarchal poetry," then Stein suggests that this
poetry "took" a long time to make, just as Stein's "Patriarchal
Poetry" embarks upon a lengthy project of unfastening. This poetic tradition,
however, may be kept "back," in the past, where it cannot harm the present text.
As the patriarchal poet, or the poetic tradition, "he" may be carried away from
the present, just as the pronoun "he" may be loosened from its freightedness as
a signifier of dominance within culture.

Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry" also represents a "fastening back,"
not to an historical point but to an imaginary one. She offers us the utopian possibility
of becoming present "before" words became ordered by the Word. This place of
"beforeness" may be under- stood as a transformation of the presymbolic relation
of intimacy between mother and child, where words have not yet become participants in the
Law of the Father, but present themselves as sounds, alive, unfastened to objects, and
fascinating ("fasten-ating") in their ceaselessly changing nature. Language in
its original and potential form, Stein suggests, transcends all our attempts to
"fasten " it down. In Stein's redeemed version of the mother-infant relation, no
figure claims priority.

Words spill with profusion into the opening of Stein's second paragraph, in a movement
illuminating her assertion that paragraphs are "emotional":

For before let it before to be before spell to be before to be before to
have to be to be for before to be tell to be to having held to be to be for before to call
to be for to be before to till until to be till before to be for before to be until to be
for before to for to be for before will for before to be shall to be to be for to be for
to be before still to be will before to be before for to be to be. (YGS, 106)

We hear a distorted echo of God's first Word here, his "Let there be. .." The
"original" "Let there be. .." becomes dispersed: we see the words
"let" and "be," and even an approximation of the whole phrase, now
"let it be," yet their location in a sentence of divine
significance has been made impossible. The word that originally might have meant God's (or
the human author's) priority"before"becomes far more unstable,
capable of breaking in two and coming together again: "to be for to be before."
The Word, transformed into this cornucopia of words, has become a matter of spelling
("spell to be before to be before"), whose original "spell" ("Let
there be. ..") may be unspelled by Stein's new incantation.

The beginning of this paragraph, "for before," represents a parody in small
of the ideology of priority. "For" literally comes before "before":
"For [comes before] before." This assertion attaches to a grander claim, as
"for," signifying "because," marks the beginning of an explanation
that might read: "Because [I came] before, [I have the right to claim power.]"
"Before," in this sense, acts as the familiar agent, guarantor, and source of
authority in Western culture. This "before," however, joins no complete
sentence, divine or human, but opens onto a tumultuous series of words,
"befores" scattered among them.

This deconstructive and demythologizing rewriting of Genesis, however, offers
simultaneously a new act of origination, a call into literary and linguistic being.
Unordered by sentences or syntax, the words in these paragraphs find a new order. As they
jostle each other in a continual movement, coming together in a different form each time
we attempt to read through them, rhyming, splitting in two and reuniting, repeating with
seemingly infinite variations, these words plunge us into the immediacy and presence of
language, where each word, even each sound, each letter, marks a birthnot a birth
out of one coherent authorial presence, but a different kind, a sudden and delightful
appearance of word after word, letter after letter, onto the whiteness of the page.

This continuous birth of language links with a "story" glimpsed but largely
unwritten, one countering Genesis with an account of an utterly democratic creation. The
"for" in one sense"let it be for"suggestsa
gift, an interpretation borne out further on:

Dedicated to all the way through. Dedicated to all
the way through.
Dedicated too all the way through. Dedicated too all the way through.
Apples and fishes day-light and wishes apples and fishes day-light and
wishes day-light at seven.
All the way through dedicated to you. (YGS, 118)

Another presence becomes felt here, one that may in an immediate sense be
"fastened" to Alice Toklas. "Alice" indeed comes in as a name within a
few lines of this dedication: "Helen greatly relieves Alice patriarchal poetry come
too there must be patriarchal poetry come too" (YGS, 119). "Patriarchal
poetry" may be transformed to such an extent that it will "come" to these
two women; or it may "come too," it may come along with other poetics, for Stein
is establishing a democracy. In this sense, the opening passage ("For before")
may represent a form of marriage vow, a statement of dedication: "to have,"
"to be," "to be for," "to be t[w]o" (an allusion to
"Alice B. Toklas") "to having held," "to call to."
All these infinitives suggest an infinity, an illimitability, of the love between these
"two," as Stein vows that she "will" [love], just as she
"shall" [ always love], "still," and for the duration of time
("while").

This allusion to Stein's relationship with an actual woman forms part of a larger
revision of the concept of genesis, for in Stein's alternative "creation" at
least two figures are present: the "we" of the "to be we"
passage"To be we to be to be we to be to be to be we to be we" (YGS, 114).
The unnamed "they" referred to throughout the piece may refer simultaneously to
"patriarchal poets" and to the two whose "wedding""Not a
piece of which is why a wedding left" (YGS, 113) [not a piece of wedding cake
is left?]"Patriarchal Poetry" announces, and through whom the
"poetry" comes into being. Together, "they have it with it reconsider it
with it" (YGS, l08), where the "it" may be both their love and,
incongruously, patriarchal poetry, which undergoes reconsideration in relation to
("with") "their" intimate creativity, their creation of intimacy.
"They might change it as it can be made to be" (YGS, 112): through their
doubled efforts, they have the power to change the very conception of authorship.

This half-articulated intimacy gives birth to an alternative language and literary form
allied to the female, although open to an interplay of gender. Toward the middle of
"Patriarchal Poetry," the birth of this new form is announced (and prayed for)
more openly:

Let her be to be to be to be let her be to be to be
let her to be let her to
be let her be to be when is it that they are shy.
Very well to try.
Let her be that is to be let her be that is to be let her be let her
try.
Let her be let her be let her be to be to be shy let her be to be let
her be
to be let her try.
Let her try.
Let her be let her be let her be let her be to be to be let her be let
her try.
To be shy. (YGS, 120)

This pronoun "her," open in its reference, may include Alice "B."
Toklas ("Let her be" can be read as "letter b"), Stein herself
("Let her try": let her attempt to recreate patriarchal poetry by renaming and
reclaiming it), and a discourse "more democratically inclusive of the feminine
("her try," or "her[s]t[o]ry," the opposite of an exclusive "his
story"), for which the text wishes and prays through its rhythmic incantation. The
word "shy," enfolding within itself both "she" and "I,"
emblematizes the doubleness of this writing. Furthermore, the plea to "let her"
constitutes an invocation to the "letter" ("let her try":
letter/herstory: a new form of literature), which, as the element composing written
language, may be "rearranged," just as Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry"
rearranges traditional "letters": "Rearrangement is nearly
rearrangement" (YGS, 119). The letter, as a material sign, comes as close as
possible to the literal, as the traditional place of the female, now drawn into language.

Inthe insistence upon language's materiality, upon its graphic shapes and
designs as well as its presence as sheer and delightful sound, Stein attempts ("Let
her try") to attach language to the body, especially to the realm of lesbian
relationship, which be- comes her figure for the form of writing she (they) urge(s) into
existence. Soon after the incantation of "Let her try," the sexuality that has
been intimated but only obliquely described bursts into articulation:

Near near near nearly pink near nearly pink nearly near near nearly
pink. Wet inside and pink outside. Pink outside and wet inside wet inside and pink outside
latterly nearly near near pink near near nearly three three pink two gentle one strong
three pink all medium medium as medium as medium sized as sized. (YGS, 121)

This passage "nearly" describes a lesbian erotics. The suggestive "wet
inside and pink outside," although it is not "fastened" to any particular
part of the body, hints at the female genitals, just as the numbers "one,"
"two," and "three" may refer to fingers. Stein's resistance to naming
names here forms an essential part of her dismantling of traditional representations of
the female body. Further, the limitlessness of this sexuality, as Stein evokes it,
represents the basis for a utopian transcendence of history. Origin and priority have no
hold here, for this erotics has no beginning and no end; it cannot be understood as a
linear narrative, just as its participants, its "authors," cannot be identified.
Each may be .'before" the other, in the sense of being present to the other, yet no
one figure emerges as the primary creator of this ongoing event. Inthis sense,
although the model for such dialogic creativity is that of lesbian love-making, the model
opens out to a larger field inclusive of both genders, in which gender itself becomes a
questionable category, since the hierarchy upon which it has been based becomes no longer
possible.

Stein sees patriarchy as dependent on a series of rigid distinctions
(man-woman, culture-nature, mind-matter), classifications that form a fixed system as
opposed to the mobile "system to pointing" intimated in "A Carafe."
But to categorize and objectify things, and to devalue the "lower" term in each
dualism (woman, nature, and matter), amounts to a sacrifice or quasi killing of the
dignity, richness, and uniqueness of the thing. Yet the categories will always be
susceptible to overthrow (or overflow) by the sacrificed terms. Woman and matter are
always coming back to life in spite of the categories that bind and oppress them.
Similarly, an anti-patriarchal or anti-sacrificial thinking is intimated in TenderButtons:
once we relinquish the absolute authority of our categories, we can examine and
understand a thing without objectifying it. A "different" text is thus a
feminist text.

. . . .

Univocal meaning, according to Stein, is one of the illusions ann
oppressions of patriarchal thinking. . . .

"Patriarchal Poetry is the same" - the opposite, then, of
"different." And the act that ritually fixes unitary meanings in place, as we
will see in due course, is sacrifice. Yet the "difference" that sacrifice
represses always comes back, in the form of semantic mobility. . . .

If patriarchal poetry is the same, anti-patriarchal poetry is
different. Monologic meaning is created through ritual killing, but the materiality of
words can always take us past that killing.

Patriarchal Poetry at best.
Best and Most.
Long and Short.
Left and Right.
There and More.
Near and Far.
Gone and Come.
Light and Fair.
Here and There.
This and Now.
Felt and How
Next and Near.
In and On.
New and Try
In and This.
Which and Felt.
Come and Leave.
By and Well.
Returned.
Patriarchal Poetry indeed.

Opaque indeed, and covertly if not blatantly inviting the reader to
skip, since the eye running down a list tends to hurry along, inattentive, expecting more
of the same, expecting tedium. The strategy here is to play transformations against the
convention of the list, that is, against the reader's expectation of uniformity. For this
list is a curious series of pairs, each member of which matches its partner differently. Best
and most might but need not be contrasting terms - the decision is qualitative;
long and short (like left and right? hardly!) are quantitative
contrasts. It is difficult to see what the relationship is between there and
more (though there's a more-or-less vague gesture toward rhyme). Position contrasted
with quantity? But near and far are familiar, and perhaps afford us a relief
that is reinforced by the equally familiar (but a reversal of the cliché) gone and
come: Ofcourse, the fact that we associate gone with farness and come
with nearness means there's another reversal going on here, too. Most of these
pairs are irreversible binomial idioms; Stein shows that reversing them does not indeed
produce nonsense but, by breaking the conventional (patriarchal?) semantic construct,
produces meaning. The next pair, light and fair, is conventionally of
synonyms, but by now the reader no doubt suspects the conventional meaning, and, as Ulla
E. Dydo remarks of Stein's language as a whole, "the bonds that tie words to things
are loosened and names split off from objects." This notion has been strongly
reinforced by the time we reach Felt and How, a line that radically departs
from the conventions this list seems to have established: It pairs a participle (or is it
a noun?) with an adverb (invoking the colloquialism "and how!" in the process?)
in one of two unpunctuated lines in the list. Dropping the punctuation draws our attention
to the aptness of the run-on pair How Next, and the writing begins to comment on
its own procedures. So as we proceed through this list we turn more and more to the
linguistic and not the referential relationships between the words in the list, only to be
brought up short, perhaps, by the sequence of the last three lines I quote. For here Returned
(playing puns, perhaps, on Leave andBy/e) marks a return to the first
line I quoted (PatriarchalPoetry at best), and leads to the utterly
ambiguous Patriarchal Poetry indeed. Is this ironic or not? How can we possibly
tell? To reflect that the uppercase version of "Patriarchal Poetry" is only one
of several in this text and might refer to the poem's title simply complicates the
matter. What we have is a list that establishes its own rules only to change them as it
goes along; it also exhibits, however, the sort of movement I already commented upon in
the sentence about "A lake" and in "Book." The list doubles back on
itself, pointing perhaps to a generic patriarchal poetry "out there" in the
(physical/social) world as well as to the poem of which these words are the title, as well
as to the words themselves - which, by this stage of the poem repeated a very great number
of times (I have not counted them), have begun to lose whatever precise lexical meaning
they might have had.

To the extent that it is an attack on the authoritarian power of
conventional, Anglocentric, and male literary values Patriarchal Poetry is a
referential work. "Patriarchal poetry," says Stein,

makes it incumbent to know on what day races will take place and where
otherwise there would be much inconvenience everywhere.
Patriarchal poetry erases what is eventually their purpose and their
inclination and their reception and their without their being beset. Patriarchal poetry an
entity.

"Patriarchal poetry," Stein says, "makes a land a
lamb"; is "obtained with seize"; "Patriarchal Poetry connected with
mean" - which in context means meanness as well as meaning; "Patriarchal Poetry
deny why" - because "Patriarchal Poetry is the same." In this forty-page
work containing a wonderful parodic eighteen-line verse entitled "Sonnet";
containing innumerable lists of phrases marching down the page; containing permutations
and repetitions; containing seemingly endless sequences of non-sequiturs; the phrase
"Patriarchal Poetry" comes to act as a kind of stabilising rhythmic force, a
steady beat of recurrence, in a linguistic context notable for its multiplicity and
unpredictability of meaning and suggestiveness. The repeated phrase "Patriarchal
Poetry" virtually loses all meaning and comes to serve as a functional cypher: The
whole poem is a form of deconstruction, then, in which the discourse demolishes the term -
and the authority and stability of the cypher - embedded within it and shaping it, acting
out as it does nonpatriarchal modes of writing. Here is a short passage:

Patriarchal Poetry to be filled to be filled to be filled to be filled
to method method who hears method method who hears who hears who hears method method
method who hears who hears who hears and method and method and method and who hears and
who who hears and method method is delightful and who and who who hears method is method
is method is delightful is who hears is delightful who hears method is who hears method is
method is method is delightful is delightful who hears who hears of of delightful who
hears of method of delightful who of whom of whom of of who hears of method method is
delightful.

This sentence is remarkable, among other things, for its method: a
series of phrases repeated in threes, a series of grammatical patterns repeated in threes
and fours, a variation from the pattern "who hears" to the pattern "who
hears of," so that the preposition "of" comes to dominate a pattern earlier
dominated by the pronoun "who," while at the same time the initial preponderance
of the verb "hears" gives way to the conspicuous verb "is," and then
reasserts itself. A cumulative pattern, gradually enlarging its field as the vocabulary
expands.

What I find most interesting in this passage, however, is the syntax:
The word "who" appears twenty times (and "whom" twice) in this
sentence of 114 words. Do any of them introduce a relative clause (or are they
interrogatives)? In order to make sense the mind seeks to subordinate elements, as in the
sequence "and who who hears and method method is delightful and who and who who hears
method is method is method is delightful," but the subordination won't hold, not
simply because that "who" is anaphoric (like the "it" in the opening
of "Book"), but because, waiting as we are,(or would be in more conventional
writing) for a verb signalling the main clause, faced with phrase after phrase and clause
after clause, whose boundaries are so indistinct that we cannot easily or clearly
differentiate one from its neighbour (like the identity of the speakers in Lifting
Belly), we simply cannot assign priority - save in the most tentative way - to any
given sequence of words: Are we to read "whom of of who," for example, the way
we might read "among / of green" in William Carlos Williams's poem "The
Locust Tree in Flower"? The syntactic data in the sentence are held in the mind
virtually in an equivalence of value, since each moment of syntactic lucidity is
immediately displaced by a subsequent word (often but by no means always a repetition). In
such intense localisation of meaning we find ourselves rescanning the words to discern
alternatives to the syntactic pattern we hit upon, and we are left sorting through a
variety of reading strategies: Are these words in apposition, or are they subordinate to
one another? What part of speech is this? And we find ourselves holding more than one
reading in mind at once. The net result is that the hierarchies are ironed out, and we
read the language paratactically, nonpatriarchally.

"Patriarchal Poetry" is a 1927 poem that did not make its way
into print until decades later. Yet it may be the only fully realized and rigorous
deconstructive poem in American modernism.

Can the poem, the title questions behind its unruffled nominalism, be about
patriarchal poetry, or is it to be an instance of patriarchal poetry? The
parameters of that question are immediately ruptured. For the "poetry" referred
to here is not just a literary genre but rather the poetics of everyday thought.
"Patriarchal poetry" is the metaphoric logic ruling the meanings that make our
culture what it is. The ambiguity of the title thus reflects Stein's judgment that
everything one writes will be in some ways patriarchal. A critique of patriarchal poetry
cannot be mounted from a position wholly outside the poetics it would critique. The only
sure strategy of demolition available is a defamiliarizing burlesque from within:

Using witty and strategically staged repetition, variation, and rhyme,
Stein exposes hierarchical gendered biases built into the most unassuming usages.
Repetition short circuits the sense that words and phrases can function as neutral
syntactic units and frees us to recognize patterns of semantic association that all
language carries with it in use: "They said they said they said when they said men. /
Men many men many how many many many men men men said many here" (p. 280).
"Men," we hear here is always a statement, always an assertion, always a
cultural imprimatur. In patriarchal poetics "they said" always says
"men" for "they" and always says "men said" for
"said." In the poetics of patriarchy, difference is really the repetition of the
same: "there is a very great difference between making money peaceably and making
money peaceably" (p 259). Or as she writes at another point: "Made a mark
remarkable made a remarkable interpretation made a remarkable made a remarkable made a
remarkable interpretation" (p. 284). A re-markable interpretation is not
remarkable at all. It is the honorific imposition of the law of male priority. It is
"patriarchal poetry as signed" (p. 286), another interpretation that is marked
and that we are linguistically prepared to remark.

Repetition and variation let Stein successively place a variety of
words, phrases, and concepts under pressure so that all the components of a statement are
shown to be individually permeated with the ruling assumptions of patriarchal poetry. This
technique also isolates and decontextualizes words and phrases, seeming at first to turn
them into unstable echolailic nonsense, but thereby severing them from their syntactical
functionalism and making it possible to see them as counters in a very different semantic
game. On the other side of nonsense is the broader ideology that patriarchal poetics
continually reinforces: "Patriarchal poetry makes no mistake" (p. 263);
"Patriarchal poetry is the same" (p. 264); "Come to a distance and it still
bears their name" (p. 264); "Patriarchal Poetry is the same as Patriotic
Poetry" (p. 264).

Patriarchal poetry is the poetics of unreflective reason and order, of
officious segmentation and classification"Patriarchal in investigation and
renewing of an intermediate rectification of the initial boundary of cows and fishes"
(p. 258)often to comic effect: "Patriarchal poetry and not meat on Monday
patriarchal poetry and meat on Tuesday. Patriarchal poetry and venison on Wednesday
Patriarchal poetry and fish on Friday Patriarchal poetry and birds on Sunday" (p.
259). Patriarchal poetry is therefore a poetics of marching: "One Patriarchal Poetry.
/ Two Patriarchal Poetry. / Three Patriarchal Poetry" (p. 274). It is the signature
of the authority of the nation state and of the corollary authority of the individual
subject: "signed by them. / Signed by him" (p.274). Patriarchal poetry is the
self-evident logic of culture transforming itself into natural fact: "If any one
decided that a year was a year when once if any one decided that a year was a year"
(p. 260). Extended in time, it is thus the reiterated story of our collective origin and
the linear history that fictitiously unfolds from it: "Able sweet and in a seat. /
Patriarchal poetry their origin their history their origin" (p. 263). And patriarchal
poetry also cuts the other way, interdicting every impulse that deviates from the norm and
its radiant myth of origins: "Patriarchal Poetry originally originate as originating
believe believing repudiate repudiating" (p. 282).

Stein's poem does not proceed in any obvious linear way; to do so would
be to adopt the armature she wants to disavow. So she works by indirection. But the poem
does have signal moments of disruption and revelation. The first of these occurs as a
serial eruption of the phrases "Let her be," "Let her try," and
"Let her be shy." They are simultaneously pleas for space for women's freedom
and commands disseminating differences through the language. "Let her be" is, of
course, also the letter "b," whose supplementarity and secondary character Stein
offers in place of patriarchal claims for priority and origination.

Stein explores the priority of male power and succession as a
discursive possibility in "Patriarchal Poetry" (1927). In its opening lines,
Stein invokes the close proximity of terms for ontological and historical validation:
"As long as it took fasten it back to a place where after all he would be carried
away." The imperative "fasten it back" suggests the constructed nature of
the historical narrative of filiation. The lines that follow blur the boundaries between
precession and being:

For before let it before to be before spell to be before to be before
to have to be to be for before to be tell to be to having held to be to be for before to
call to be for to be before to till until to be till before to be for before to be until
to be for before to for to be for before will for before to be shall to be to be. . . .

Here the terms for temporal priority and spatial proximity
("before") merge with terms for being ("to be," "to be
for"), creating a sentence whose grammatical structure embodies the difficulty of
establishing a "place" for presence. "There was never a mistake in
addition," Stein concludes, and in a world in which existence is based on having
gained priority (having been here before), things will always add up to the same thing. In
"Patriarchal Poetry," the sum of all equations is patriarchy.

I have spoken of the incarnational structure of Christianity by which
an originating voice, or reason, is succeeded by a supplemental logos or word. In
"Patriarchal Poetry," this narrative dominates Stein's structure of repetitions
and is given explicit emphasis in the work's opening. "To change a boy with a cross
from there to there" suggests ways that Christian incarnation ("a boy with a
cross") inaugurates history and establishes the terms for repetition:

Let him have him have him heard let him have him heard him third let
him have him have him intend let him have him have him defend let him have him have him
third let him have him have him heard let him have him have him occurred let him have him
have him third.

The sheer monotony of these lines illustrates the rule of succession
being invoked. "Let him have him" defines the horizon of progress in terms of
male succession. The variation, "let him have him third," neutralizes numerical
sequence by the repetitions of male pronouns. The dialectical aporia, the
"third" term, can never be anything more than a repetition of the same. The
biblical incarnation in John, "In the beginning was the Word," is reconfigured
by Stein as a conundrum: if the word is already gendered as male, can it engender anything
other than itself again and again? The terms that interrupt the repetitions above -
"third," "occurred," "intend," "defend" - are
framed by the phrase "have him" so that all variation is a direct function of a
"him" who permits it.

The priority of a patriarchal principle is based in language,
specifically in a speech-based linguistics. Stein undermines such phonocentrism by
pointing to the pragmatic contexts within which certain linguistic formulations occur. The
form that her pointing takes is a satire of male rhetorics of proof and validation. By
substituting the term "patriarchal poetry" for other substantives, she indicates
the extent to which the proof and the subject-position that establishes proof are
connected. In one case, she mocks the way that domestic life - specifically regimens of
eating and cooking - is permeated by a patriarchal principle:

Patriarchal poetry and not meat on Monday patriarchal poetry and meat
on Tuesday. Patriarchal poetry and venison on Wednesday Patriarchal poetry and fish on
Friday Patriarchal poetry and birds on Sunday Patriarchal poetry and chickens on Tuesday
patriarchal poetry and beef on Thursday.

Marianne DeKoven calls the repetition of the title motif
"arbitrary," but I find repetitions such as these highly directed, suggesting
that along with daily bread, one consumes an ordered logic as well. "Patriarchal
poetry" refers both to the gendered basis of daily life and its dissemination
through poetry.

The criterion upon which DeKoven evaluates Stein's work is its ability
to sustain variation and change. Thus, she admires works such as Tender Buttons or
"Susie Asado" because they constantly vary and reconfigure language in new and
interesting ways. Long works such as "Patriarchal Poetry," on the other hand,
suffer from redundancy. It is true that the latter makes for difficult reading, but
redundancy is very much at issue in its critique of male discourse. By filling her
paragraphs with the same words, often subordinated to the phrase "patriarchal
poetry," Stein undermines the function of all series - lists, catalogs, and schedules
- that appear to structure the quotidian. Far from organizing reality, Stein's lists point
back at the rationalizing tendency itself:

Patriarchal Poetry sentence sent once.
Patriarchal Poetry is used with a spoon.
Patriarchal poetry is used with a spoon with a spoon.
Patriarchal poetry is used with a spoon.
Patriarchal poetry used with a spoon.
Patriarchal poetry in and for the relating of now and ably.

If the function of a list or a schedule is to distinguish and isolate,
Stein's lists show the entropic nature of such a win to power. Within the logic of
patriarchy all distinctions are moot. The difference between something "used with a
spoon" and something "used with a spoon with a spoon" is only the illusion
of difference.

I have said that "Patriarchal Poetry" foregrounds pragmatic
frames for utterances. Many of the paragraphs create the effect of discourse without any
human or social context. If Wordsworth's definition of poetic discourse is a language of
men speaking to men, Stein's variation is of systems speaking to systems:

Patriarchal poetry makes no mistake makes no mistake in estimating the
value to be placed upon the best and most arranged of considerations of this in as apt to
be not only to be partially and as cautiously considered as in allowance which is one at a
time. At a chance at a chance encounter it can be very well as appointed as appointed not
only considerately but as it as use.

The humor of such passages lies in their mockery of professional or
bureaucratic rhetoric, with all of its minor discriminations, parenthetical
qualifications, and unqualified assertions. The glaringly absent term here is any referent
for the "value to be placed upon the best." Patriarchal poetry is faultless
because, as a structure of legitimation, it has permeated the very logic of value itself.

Where does woman exist within "patriarchal poetry" (the
system, not Stein's text)? At one level, she is its object, that about which a male poetry
is written. Stein satirizes the goals of traditional love poetry in a sonnet placed at the
text's center:

A Sonnet

To the wife of my bosom
All happiness from everything
And her husband.
May he be good and considerate
Gay and cheerful and restful.
And make her the best wife
In the world
The happiest and most content
With reason ...

The poem concludes by hoping that the wife's "charms her qualities
her joyous nature" will make her husband "A proud and happy man." The
function of the sonnet, as Stein sees it, is not to celebrate the wife but to hope she
will continue to satisfy her husband. This is patriarchal poetry with a vengeance, and
although Stein was perfectly capable of aping the bourgeois structure of the family
herself, with Alice as wife and herself as husband, this sonnet, with its Hallmark
Greeting Card sentimentality, suggests how ironically she could treat this ménage.
Furthermore, it suggests that what sonnets are "about" is ultimately a system of
avowals, the human terms for which are socially determined.

The longest catalog in "Patriarchal Poetry" is one consisting
of variations on the phrase "Let her try" ("Let her be," "Let her
be shy," "Let her try"), concluding with the appeal

Never to be what he said.
Never to be what he said
Never to be what he said
Let her to be what he said.
Let her to be what he said.

In terms of Stein's biography, we could see this as representing
Stein's attempt to be free of her brother Leo, not to be "what he said" but to
"try" to be herself. This may help explain Stein's desire to live outside of
patriarchal authority, but it does not address the material form in which this desire is
expressed. By focusing on the grammatical and pragmatic contexts of negation ("Never
to be"), of commands ("Let her be"), and existence ("to be"),
Stein inverts the authority of patriarchal language and points to the discursive nature of
subject production itself. That she performs her deconstruction with a great deal of humor
and wicked wit makes her task all the more oppositional.

Many of the critics on MAPS astutely trace the
deconstructive force of Steins "Patriarchal Poetry," crediting the
poems form with radically destabilizing binary oppositions. Yet, they seem to take
the specific discursive resonances of individual terms as somewhat irrelevant. Quartermain
explicitly argues that the poem "covertly if not blatantly invit[es] the reader to
skip, since the eye running down a list tends to hurry along, inattentive, expecting more
of the same, expecting tedium." He further claims that "The repeated phrase
Patriarchal Poetry virtually loses all meaning and comes to serve as a
functional cypher;" thus the texts deconstructive project is enacted by denying
"patriarchy" any power of meaning. Yearsley agrees, arguing that the poem
"places the term patriarchal poetry into the multiple suggestive
incoherent mode of discourse it is opposed to, where it stands out like a rock, meaning
nothing and heard only as a drum beat." This supposed deconstructive draining of
meaning is also seen as radically decontextualized. Davidson argues that "Many of the
paragraphs create the effect of discourse without any human or social context. If
Wordsworth's definition of poetic discourse is a language of men speaking to men, Stein's
variation is of systems speaking to systems." And, as Yearsley astutely points out,
the sound of "systems speaking to systems" is "often reminiscent of the
repeated squeakings and jerkings of a piece of machinery."

While these readings help account for the
disturbing, compelling power of this text, I think they somewhat miss the mark. For it
seems to me that the poems repeatedly insistent identification of what
"patriarchal poetry" is describes the monumental and multiple meanings it may
have as a repressive agent. Denying "patriarchal" discursive meaning does
nothing to resist patriarchal oppression. If "patriarchy" is one name for a
discursive system of power that aims for the illusion of totality for the panoptic
internalization of its terms, then resistance lies in exposing the illusory nature of that
seeming totality and externalizing the terms of oppression, both of which can be done by
imagining an other to power. This imagining is what I think the text not so much describes
as tries to enact. It is, however, a deconstructive enactment. Far from being
de-contextualized and groundless, though, the text speaks from a fundamentally
deconstructive place. The trouble in interpreting such a text, however, lies in the fact
that this place can only be described metaphorically, not directly. It is the
"outside" of discourse that cannot be spoken; we allude to it in an effort to
resist repressive discourses. One productive way to approach Steins metaphorical
gesture towards this impossible outside is by comparing it to other similar projects. I
think two such examples are William S. Burroughss "cut-up"
theory/aesthetic and Martin Heideggers proto-deconstructive philosophy.*

Burroughs characterized the discursively
constructed "reality" inhabited by the subjects of discourse with the metaphor
of a movie set. The way to resist the repressive power of discourse, then, is to move
subjectivity off the set. In order to get off the "set" of language, Burroughs
proposed that the physical cutting of the text. Based on an accidental dissection of a
newspaper by a friend, the artist Brion Gyson, Burroughs began taking pages of both his
own prose and the texts of others, cutting them (e.g. into four equal squares),
rearranging the sections, and then transcribing the newly juxtaposed words and phrases.
While Burroughs sometimes claims that this process is random, his own narrative/editorial
control is evident in his "cut-up" short stories and novels. In juxtaposing a
story from the New York Times or a text of Kafkas with his own satirical
narratives of resistance to total discursive control, Burroughs uses powers own
terms to deconstruct its repressive construction of subjectivity. In a similar manner,
Steins re-juxtapositions of both the name and the self-representations of
patriarchal power break them free from their usual effects. Without taking
patriarchys terms off patriarchys "set," they would operate
according to their usual roles even in Steins text. In both Burroughss and
Steins text, the specificity of the discursive power "set" off of which
they are trying to move is far from irrelevant, for the "outside" of discourse
is only reached by dismantling specific, carefully chosen parts of the "set" and
placing them in new, resistant configurations. Burroughs often claimed that he wanted to
destroy the form of the novel. In destroying the (usual) form of poetry, Stein opens
cracks in the discourse of (patriarchal) power that facilitate resistance; in the same way
Burroughs tries to open cracks in the discourse of total governmental surveillance and
control.

Another possible comparison for Steins
metaphorical gesture towards the "outside" of discursive power is
Heideggers late proto-deconstructive project. Heidegger locates the possibility of
subjective meaning outside the determining forms of Western philosophical discourse in the
space in-between subject and object. He called this place the "clearing" (as in
a forest) where meaning can (re)present itself to the subject. This "clearing"
is analogous to Burroughss space off the "set" of discourse. While this
clearing is neither subjective or objective, both terms are fundamental to its being. This
is closely related to the notion that in deconstructing the Cartesian mind/body split,
neither term can be ignored (as many deconstructive models often do). Given this
scandalously flattened account of Heideggers deconstructive impulses, I would say
that "Patriarchal Poetry"s locus of enunciation may be compared to this
Heideggerian "clearing." This is why we can recognize the terms but are somewhat
at a loss for meaning, for while there is a subjective context, subjectivity is
only one aspect. The reader is paradoxically given a foothold of subjective identification
in the speaking voice of the poem while at the same time s/he is denied a stable subject
position within the text to inhabit by its dislocating move beyond the conventions of
subjective speech towards an impossible space of patriarchys objective
representation. This "clearing" or space "off the set" is both
comprised of and radically other than the subjective and objective.

Steins text, then, tries to enact a space
(like Burroughss "off the set" or Heideggers "clearing)
different from the totalizing potential of patriarchal discourse. One way in which it does
this is through the recurrent presence of the number "three," suggesting a third
way beyond the logic of "either/or." The frequent juxtapositions of
"one" and "two" cumulatively suggest something beyond patriarchy, a
discursive clearing in which one need not be subjectified by patriarchal discourse (e.g.
56, 58, etc.). Another way the text uses numbers to suggest something other than
patriarchy is in the numbering of patriarchies: "One Patriarchal Poetry / Two
Patriarchal Poetry / Three Patriarchal Poetry" (69). Thus patriarchal
discourses illusory will to totality is exploded, for Steins text exposes it
as a multiplicity rather than the naturalized, monolithic "way of the world"
contained in its self-(mis)representations.

This "other" possibility is also
suggested by the verbs which, in the absence of predication, take on an imperative nature.
Commands such as "reconsider;" "Compare something else to something
else" (57); "Reject rejoice rejuvenate" (59); "Leave it" (60);
etc., far from draining the terms of power of all meaning, charge the reader to actively
engage and transform the subjective, coercive meanings of patriarchal discourse. Closely
related to the texts use of the imperative is the prevalence of subjunctive voice,
e.g. in the repeated "might"s and "as if"s. By speaking in the
subjunctive mode of possibility, the text undermines patriarchys declarative claims
to necessity.

Far from denying the power of patriarchal
discourse, then, the text warns that " There is no use at all in reorganizing in
reorganizing" (77). One cannot resist patriarchy merely by recapitulating the terms
of its power, as a simple inversion or denial would do. Despite Ruddicks claim that
"[a] different text is thus a feminist text," Steins
subversion depends on a recognition not only of the power of difference but also the power
of patriarchys often stunning mystification of its own duality. The text warns of
"Patriarchal poetry recollected" and "Patriarchal poetry relined" (69,
73), taking seriously the power of patriarchy to mutate around resistance, re-inscribing
the rebel subject into its discursive policing. The text itself is not purely other than
this patriarchal power, for while there is "patriarchal Poetry in Pieces,"
"patriarchal Poetry has that [reunion] return" (74). Part of the urgent
breathlessness of the texts mechanized repetition is the anxiety over its own level of
contamination in a discursive system that it can never wholly be outside. Subjects can
approach the Heideggerian clearing, but will never reach it. "Patriarchal
Poetry" both speaks from and tries to enact a space within that approach.

*My brief, admittedly flattened accounts of
Burroughs and Heidegger rely on the following sources:

Krzysztof Ziarek describes Gertrude Stein’s quasi-epic prose poem “Patriarchal Poetry” as an exemplar of the “poetics of the event,” embodying the “idiomatic character of each happening, the particularity of its configuration and circumstances, which are lost in the generality of linguistic naming” (MAPS). While I’m intrigued by this notion and its aura of teeth-gritting intensity, I want to deflate the pathos of the “event” and come to the poem armed with a less grandiose concept: tone. Usually defined as the poet’s attitude toward her subject or reader, tone can be understood more precisely (or more nebulously, depending on your point of view) as the mood or emotion of the poem. But what exactly is the tone or event-ness of passages like this: “Once or two makes that be not at all practically their choice practically their choice. / Might a bit of it be all the would be might be if it of it be all they would be”? (59). Approached from this angle, Stein’s poem appears tonally ambiguous and ultimately, I argue, atonal or seemingly lacking in any identifiable emotional content. Further, the poem’s atonal artillery forms part of Stein’s challenge to patriarchal poetry: to evade representing or expressing any emotion that can fall under the power of Adamic naming and to return to a pre-emotional state (or “pre-Symbolic,” in the psychoanalytic jargon) by way of a detour through atonality: “As we went out by the same way we came back again after a detour” (79).

Although the poem strategically evades emotion, it does produce certain effects. In fact, its effects are exceptionally strong (maybe even psychosis-inducing). However, these strong effects are not as easy to identify as, say, Claude McKay’s rage in “To the White Fiends” or Lucia Trent’s “unstable mix of anger, anguish, and contempt” (Cary Nelson, MAPS) expressed in “Breed, Women, Breed.” While anger and contempt may have motivated Stein’s composition of the poem, they are not in any way evident in the poem itself. By themselves, possibly angry commands presumably directed towards men, such as “let her be,” lose their emotive force through their excessive repetition: “Let her be. / Let her try. / Let her be let her let here let here be let here be let here be let her be shy let her be let her be let her try. / Let her try.” Although repetition deconstructs anger, these lines still command an atonal force that unsettles men’s familiarity with female anger-resentment and instead launches into a strange, pre-emotional affective register.

A practical distinction between “emotion” and “affect” will prove useful here. “Affect” refers to a sort of pre-cognitive intensity, a bodily resonance that gets “taken up” into consciousness as it combines with ideas or judgments. That is, emotion is the “species” of the genus “affect,” or to put it another way: affect is the detour through which we come back to emotion. To use an absurd but illustrative example: rocks can be affected in various ways (e.g. ground up into dust or thrown through a window), but they do not, like humans, have emotions like anger, shame, joy, or disgust. In other words, the poem’s atonality is the detour through a pre-cognitive, affective zone. The poem’s opening suggests such a detour: “As long as it took fasten it back to a place where after all he would be carried away” (55). Quite literally, the poem seeks to “carry away” the (male) reader by fastening itself back to a new affective experience, namely a painful one, despite its occasional and inevitable “slippage” into melodious musical passages.

Rather, the poem’s atonality challenges the possibility that at some level the expression or representation of all emotion is inherently pleasurable, even when such emotions are negative, however anguished they may be. The pleasure derived from patriarchal poetry’s use of the logic of comparison to transfigure all things into beauty is subverted: “Compare something else to something else. To be rose. / Such a pretty bird” (57). Instead, the poem ensnares the reader in the circular logic of the same: “Patriarchal Poetry and left of it left of it Patriarchal Poetry left of it Patriarchal Poetry left of it as many twice as many patriarchal poetry left to it twice…” (70). The constant doubling and leftward turning produces a sort of dizzying effect, a nausea that decisively subverts pleasure yet also seems to take pleasure in this subversion. The poem, like atonal music, seems seductively turned away from the reader/listener, enjoying itself in its own alterity and actually being (rather than expressing or representing) a new tone, a new affect.

“No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he doesn’t understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.”

—Jacques Derrida, from an interview in Derrida and Différence

Gertrude Stein’s genre-bending (-obliterating? –inventing?) text, “Patriarchal Poetry,” seems primarily interested in creating what I want to call productive dissonance—that is, a dissonance that produces new cultural space or discourse. She does this by, to use Derrida’s phrasing, tampering with the language. One almost imagines she wanted it to border, in places, on the unreadable, or at least unpleasant, while in others it is quite aurally pleasing. Why would she want to do such a thing? There is no key that unlocks this text, but the long series of near-repetitions

Let her try.
Let her try.
Let her be.
Let her be shy.
Let her try. (65)

lends some insight into her project here. I count thirty-eight instances of the phrase “let her try” in this movement of the poem, by far the dominant phrase within the series of repetitions and near-repetitions; and it is quite telling that the stanzaic paragraph is completed as “let her try to be” (ibid). Stein’s text here refuses, even more than most poetic productions, any sort of clean interpretation, but it seems at least part of the text’s point that women who produce non-patriarchal poetry (especially at the time she is writing) must be allowed to try, must be allowed to try to be, as there is no poetic form in which women can be at the time she is writing.

And this is exactly what the formal dissonance of her text is trying to invent, a counter-discourse and then hopefully a new discourse beyond that counter-discourse, which is no longer tethered by that “counter-“ to the patriarchal discourse. Or perhaps it would be better to say that her text is trying to clear away and create the space for just such a new untethered and unfettered discourse, for her text itself does not quite achieve the Aufhebung stage of the dialectic of discourses I am imagining as its goal (conscious or un-). It is therefore a dialectical dissonance she has produced.

And so, since I have let Hegel into the conversation, how else might he be able to help us? I think perhaps recognition theory here plays a role in Stein’s project. If we apply Hegel’s recognition theory model, with its constant battle between subjects vying for recognition from and/or domination over other subjects, couldn’t we read Stein’s text as a bid for recognition, albeit a necessarily dissonant or destructive one (though dissonant and destructive for the purpose of creation or Aufhebung)?

We might also apply another great dialectician to the text. When Stein writes “Patriarchal poetry in regular places placed regularly as if it were placed regularly regularly placed regularly as if it were” (67), isn’t she doing a critique of ideology in the Marxian sense? The empowered normalize the place of patriarchal poetry by placing it regularly in the regular places (e.g., journals, anthologies, classrooms) where is it entirely normal (regular) to find such things. It’s that wonderfully ambiguous “as if it were” that cuts through the surface of naturalized ideology—as if it were normal or natural for this to be the order of things. But it isn’t, Stein seems to be telling us, either right or natural, but rather merely the effect of patriarchal power that ensures the placement of patriarchal poetry over competing discourses.

So far, however, I have only discussed what Stein’s poem is doing, but I haven’t answered the question I posed earlier of why she might have done this, purposely or not. I am reminded of Slavoj Žižek’s discussion, in his book Violence, of a considerably more recent event, the 2005 riots in France by Muslim French citizens. He incisively points out:

The Paris riots were not rooted in any kind of concrete socio-economic protest, still less in an assertion of Islamic fundamentalism. One of the first sites to be burned was a mosque…The riots were simply a direct effort to gain visibility. A social group which, although part of France and composed of French citizens, saw itself as excluded from the political and social space proper wanted to render its presence palpable to the general public. Their actions spoke for them: like it or not, we’re here, no matter how much you pretend not to see us…[T]heir main premise was that they wanted to be and were French citizens, but were not fully recognized. (Žižek 76-77)

Obviously the struggle for recognition in the two cases are not identical (are any such struggles?), but we can learn something here that is perhaps useful to understanding the abrasiveness of Stein’s style. She wanted to rattle cages. Writing in the dominant and accepted style, or writing in a pleasurable or easy one, would have caused the poem to go unnoticed, under the cultural radar. By creating dissonance, she announced a presence in literature heretofore largely ignored. She burnt down anything she could to register her presence and thus demand recognition (in the Hegelian sense).

Stein succeeds in demanding and thus creating the cultural space possible for a new discourse to emerge, and for that alone, she should be ranked among the foremost innovators of modern poetry.